Cuttlefish Tip Jar

EVENTS

As someday it may happen
An election we must hold
I’ve got a little list
It’s not a little list
Of the lies and utter falsehoods
That this Romney chap has told
Which must not be dismissed
They cannot be dismissed

Sadly, I don’t have time right now to complete the Mikado list song–might have to revisit this concept, or just let you do it. But the list itself is now in the neighborhood of 700 documented lies, in weekly installments by Steve Benen each Friday on the Maddow Blog. You can find the 35th installment of the list here. It has links to all the previous versions.

(Their standards are a bit stricter than mine–repetitions of the same lie on different occasions counts for them, and some of the lies are, I think, open to interpretation, although an honest observer would have to admit that Romney is at minimum stretching the truth beyond its capacity to recover. With my looser standards, you’d only have perhaps a couple hundred unique lies being told. Which is still plenty of grist for the lyrical mill.)

“Romney’s chances of winning are low”
is the message wherever I go
But what keeps me up nights–
Do I only chose sites
That confirm what I already “know”?

Confirmation bias, that’s what frightens me. You see it everywhere, especially the big news/opinion sites. Read about the latest poll and what it means in an article, and then check what the readers have taken away.

Republican commenters will point to one or two outlying polls as “accurate”, and to others as “liberally biased”. I have (no, I won’t dig it up) seen commenters utterly certain that Rove has “put the fix in” in a handful of districts, and really, it only comes down to a handful of districts in a handful of states. I have heard, again and again–and from both sides–“just you wait until November; you’ll see!”

I remember a reporter, back in 1988, who was just gobsmacked that Dukakis had not won. The reporter had been assigned to the Democrat’s campaign, and as such was inside the protective bubble of spin control. Every bit of news was filtered through an environment that heard what it wanted to hear, and refused to hear what it did not, to the point where a supposedly objective newsman fully expected, even in the last weeks, a Dukakis win.

It makes perfect sense that, in an age of information glut, where we simply do not have time to take in all the available information, that we pick and choose what we will read or listen to. And it is perfectly human of us to be biased when we do so. My mother in law fully expects a Romney/Ryan landslide. All the polls she has seen point that way. I find myself visiting Nate Silver’s blog and hoping he’s right.

In my visits to news sites, I see people utterly convinced of the truth of diametrically opposed realities. And it scares me to death.

Not because I see it in them.

But because I don’t always see it in me. And yet, the odds are I am doing the same thing.

Oh, and the “push polls” have started! These are polls that are designed with clearly biased questions, intended to force the respondent to respond favorably to whoever is behind the poll (“given X’s history of mistakes, can he be trusted to…?”). These biased polls are intended to give a picture of support, or of momentum, or of some sort of consensus for a candidate above what the candidate has actually earned. So the polls my mother in law cites, for instance, may well exist, although they may be methodologically suspect.

And since none (or very few) of us have the time or resources to check the methodologies of all of the relevant polls, we all too often trust… the ones that agree with our expectations.

I read it just this morning (I will need to make this clear,
But I had to check the calendar to verify the year)
On what claims to be a news site, and a major one, I fear—
They debated the reality of Hell

I thought Hell was merely fiction; just a myth from long ago
An adapted form of Hades, which the Greeks saw down below
For an educated person, this is something you should know
It’s a story that the ancients used to tell

In our modern world, the concept of a Heaven or a Hell
Or creation in a paradise from which our species fell
Is a sign that the believer isn’t thinking very well—
Those are remnants of beliefs from way back when

Or at least that’s how it should be; I was truly shocked to see
In our age of information (and so much of it is free!)
Such an ancient and outdated view—so how, then, could it be
On the home page—yes, today—at CNN?

[Tuesday] the EPA announced they’re giving more than $57 million in grants to the Texas Water Development Board fund for drinking water. “The funds will be used by the state of Texas to provide loan assistance to eligible water systems for infrastructure improvements needed to ensure safe drinking water is available to Texas residents,” the agency says.

It is, absolutely, the case that the drought is less problematic now than it was when Perry held his prayer at the beginning of what is typically the rainy season. It’s similar, I guess, to the success I have achieved when I head to the beach right after low tide and pray for high tide.